If
materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious.There seems to be no principled reason to
deny entityhood to spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings.The United States can be considered as a
concrete, spatially distributed but informationally integrated entity.Considered as such, the United States is at
least a candidate for the literal possession of real psychological states,
including consciousness.The question,
then, is whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for
consciousness.My suggestion is that if
those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and alien
species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States
probably does meet those criteria.The
United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in
sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings.Its internal representational states are
functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned
artificially from outside by the acts of an external user.And the United States exhibits complex
linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that
reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external
conditions.

[This
is a draft, surely full of undetected errors and oversights.I welcome feedback.Before citing, please check my website for
the latest version.]

If Materialism
Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

If
materialism is true, the reason you have
a stream of conscious experience – the reason there’s something it’s like to be
you while there’s (presumably!) nothing it’s like to be a toy robot or a bowl
of chicken soup, the reason you possess what Anglophone philosophers call phenomenology – is that the material
stuff out of which you are made is organized the right way.You might find materialism attractive if you
dislike the thought that people are animated by immaterial spirits or possess
immaterial properties.[1]

Here’s another thought you might
dislike: The United States is, literally, like you, phenomenally conscious.That is, the United States, conceived of as a
spatially distributed entity with people as (some of) its parts, literally
possesses a stream of conscious experience over and above the experiences of
its members considered individually.I
will argue in this essay that accepting the materialist idea you probably like
(if you’re a typical early 21st century philosopher) should draw you
to accept some group consciousness ideas you probably don’t like (if you’re a
typical early 21st century philosopher) – unless you choose,
instead, to accept some other ideas you probably ought to like even less.

The argument in brief is this. If you’re a materialist, you probably think
that rabbits have conscious experience.And
you ought to think that.After all,
rabbits are at lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically.If you’re a materialist, you probably also
think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings
behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different.And you ought to think that.After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism;
the vast universe (or multiverse) presumably contains many entities that a neutral
observer would recognize to be as complex, linguistic, intelligent, and self-aware
as we are.It would be odd if among them
only we with our neurons had phenomenal consciousness.But, I will argue, a materialist who accepts
the possibility of consciousness in oddly-formed aliens ought to accept the
possibility of consciousness in spatially distributed group entities.If she then also accepts rabbit
consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather
dumb group entities. Finally, the United
States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort.(Or maybe, even, it’s rather smart, but
that’s more than I need for my argument.)If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially
distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types
of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious
beings.

Of course it’s utterly bizarre to
suppose that the United States is literally phenomenally conscious.[2]But how good an objection is that?Elsewhere, I’ve argued that in metaphysics in
general and in the metaphysics of mind in particular, it is impossible for a
well-developed position entirely to avoid stark violations of common sense –
and we ought to expect in any case that common sense would be an untrustworthy
guide to metaphysical truth.[3]Unfortunately, I suggest in that work, once
common sense is removed as a trustworthy ground of theory choice, metaphysics
reveals itself to be what skeptical outsiders have often thought it was: a
bizarre fabric of irresolvable alternatives.It’s possible to love metaphysics nonetheless, in a skeptical way.Defense of this general perspective is my
background agenda.

My argument is conditional and gappy. If
materialism is true, probably the
United States is conscious.Alternatively, if materialism is true, the most natural thing to conclude is that the United States is
conscious.

We are deeply prejudiced beings.Whites are prejudiced against blacks;
Gentiles against Jews; overestimators against underestimators.[4]Even when we intellectually reject such
prejudices, they permeate our behavior and our implicit assumptions.[5]Were we to meet interplanetary alien travelers
similar to us in overall intelligence and moral character, we would likely be
prejudiced against them too, especially if their morphology were radically unfamiliar.

It’s hard to imagine a prejudice more
ineradicably deep than our prejudice against entities that are visibly
spatially discontinuous – a prejudice built, perhaps, even into the basic
functioning of our visual system.[6]Analogizing to racism, sexism, and
speciesism, let’s call such prejudice contiguism.

You might think that so-called
contiguism is always justified and thus undeserving of a pejorative label.You might think, for example, that spatial
contiguity is a necessary condition of objecthood, so that it makes no more
sense to speak of a spatially discontinuous entity than it makes sense – unless
you adopt some liberal views about ontology[7] –
to speak of an entity composed of your left shoe, the Eiffel tower, and the
rings of Saturn.If you’ll excuse me for
saying so, that attitude is foolish provincialism.Let me introduce you to some of my favorite non-Earthly
species.

The
Sirian supersquids. In the oceans of a planet around Sirius
lives a naturally-evolved animal with a central head and a thousand tentacles.It’s a very smart animal – as smart, as
linguistic, as artistic and creative as human beings are, though the
superficial form of its language and art is very different from our own.Let’s call these animals “supersquids”.

The supersquid’s brain is not centrally
located like our own.Rather, the
supersquid brain is distributed mostly among nodes in its thousand tentacles,
while its head is home to digestive and reproductive organs and the like.Despite their spatial distribution across its
body, however, the supersquid’s cognitive processes are fully integrated, and
supersquids report having a single, unified stream of conscious experience.Part of what enables their cognitive and
phenomenal integration is this: Rather than having relatively slow
electrochemical nerves, supersquid nerves work via reflective capillaries
carrying light signals, something like Earthly fiber optics.The speed of these signals ensures the tight
temporal synchrony of the cognitive activity shooting among the tentacular
nodes (and also saves the supersquid precious milliseconds of reaction time to
peripheral signals).Three hundred
million years ago, the Sirians’ home planet had been a giant warehouse for a now-defunct
civilization’s high-tech optical fiber.The
planet was seeded with bacteria that evolved into multicellular organisms,
along the way first adapting to incorporate local optical materials and then
later manufacturing their own.The
supersquids’ ancestors congealed as amalgams of simpler organisms most of which
became tentacles, unified in their operations by capillaries passing through
the central head – though the central head is less cognitively important now,
as I will explain shortly.

The supersquids show all external signs
of consciousness.They have covertly
visited Earth, and one is a linguist who has mastered English well enough to
ace the Turing test: He can be (when he wants to) indistinguishable in verbal
behavior from a normal adult human being.Like us, the supersquids have communities of philosophers and
psychologists who write eloquent books and articles about the metaphysics of
consciousness, about emotional phenomenology, about their imagery and
dreams.Any unbiased alien observer
looking at Earth and at the supersquid home planet would see no good grounds
for ascribing consciousness to us and denying it to the supersquids.Although certain supersquid philosophers have
expressed doubts that Earthly life is capable of genuine phenomenal
consciousness, given our radically different physiological structure, I’m glad
to say that only a benighted minority of supersquids holds that view.

Here’s another interesting feature of
supersquids: They can detach their limbs.Earlier in their evolutionary history, their limbs were permanently
attached, as most species’ limbs are.But light signals can travel through water.The two main things required for a supersquid
limb to be separable is that it be able to maintain homeostasis briefly on its
own and that suitable light-signal transceivers appear on the surface of the
limb and the bodily surface to which the limb is normally attached.Once the supersquids’ ancestors began down
this evolutionary path, selective advantages nudged them farther along.Detachable limbs are, among other things,
terrific for hunting and for reaching into narrow spaces.Two major subsequent adaptations were these:
First, the nerve signals between the head and the limb-surface transceivers
shifted to wavelengths less readily occluded by obstacles.And second, the limb-surface transceivers
developed the ability to communicate directly between themselves without
needing to pass signals through the central head.Since the speed of light is negligible,
supersquids can now detach arbitrarily many limbs and send them roving widely
across the sea with hardly any disruption of their normal cognitive processing.The energetic costs are high, but the
supersquids, being technologically savvy, are able to supplement their diet
sufficiently and also to artificially amplify their signals.

In this limb-roving condition the limbs
remain constantly under full central (or “central”) control; their limbs are
not roving independently under local limb-only control, then reporting back.Limb-roving squids remain as cognitively
integrated do non-roving squids, and as intimately in control of their entire
spatially distributed selves.Despite
all the spatial intermixing of their limbs with those of other supersquids,
each individual’s cognitive processes remain private because each supersquid
has a distinctive signature wavelength pattern employed by its transceivers.Furthermore, if a limb is lost, new ones can
be artificially grown and fitted, though losing too many limbs at once can
result in substantially impaired memory and cognitive function.The supersquids are now starting to
experiment with limb exchange, including developing inter-individual compatible
transceiver signals.This has led them
toward more Parfitian views of personal identity than one typically finds in
humans, and it has changed their views on the possibilities of marriage, team
sports, and scientific collaboration.[8]

I hope you’ll agree with me, and with
the opinion universal among the supersquids, that supersquids are coherent
entities.Despite their spatial
discontinuity, they aren’t arbitrary collections.They are integrated systems that can be
treated, at least for social and cognitive and philosophy-of-mind purposes, as beings
of the sort that might house consciousness.And if they might, they do.Or so
you should probably say if you’re a mainline philosophical materialist.After all, supersquids are naturally evolved
beings that act and speak and write and philosophize just like we do.

Does it matter that this is only science
fiction?I hope you’ll agree that supersquids
– or entities relevantly similar, that is, entities having spatially
distributed conscious cognition mediated by light waves – are at least physically possible.[9]And if such entities are physically possible,
and if the universe is as large as most contemporary cosmologists think it is –
maybe even infinite, maybe even one among an infinite number of infinite
universes![10]
– then it might not be a bad bet that some such spatially distributed intelligences
are actual.Biology can be provincial,
maybe, but not metaphysics; you’d better have room in your metaphysics for supersquids.

The
Antarean antheads.On
the surface of a planet around Antares lives a species of animals who look like
woolly mammoths but who act much like human beings.I have gazed into my crystal ball and this is
what I see: Tomorrow, they visit Earth.They watch our television shows, learn our language, and politely ask
permission to tour our lands.It turns
out that they are sanitary, friendly, excellent conversationalists, and well
supplied with rare metals for trade, so they are welcomed across the
globe.They are quirky in a few ways,
however.For example, their cognitive
activity takes them, on average, about ten times longer to execute.This has no overall effect on their
intelligence – especially since they live a thousand years and in their natural
environment face few physical threats requiring swift reaction – but it does test
the patience of conversational partners unaccustomed to the Antareans’ slow
pace.The Antareans also find some tasks
cognitively easy that we find cognitively difficult, and vice versa.For example, they are baffled and amused by
our difficulty with simple logic problems like the Wason Selection Task (Wason
1968) and tensor calculus, but they are impressed by our skill in integrating
auditory and visual information.

Over time, some Antareans migrate
permanently down from their orbiting ship.Patchy accommodations are made for their size and speed, and they start
to attend our schools and join our corporations.Some achieve political office and display
approximately the normal human range of vices.Although Antareans don’t reproduce by coitus, they find some forms of
physical contact arousing and have broadly human attitudes toward
pair-bonding.Marriage equality is
achieved.What a model of interplanetary
harmony!Ordinary people across the
planet all agree, of course, that Antareans are conscious.Did I mention that, like the Sirian
supersquids, some of them are very accomplished philosophers of mind and
introspective psychologists?

Here’s why I call them “antheads”: Their
heads and humps contain not neurons but rather ten million squirming insects,
each a fraction of a millimeter across.Each insect has a complete set of minute sensory organs and a nervous
system of its own, and the antheads’ behavior arises from complex patterns of
interaction among these individually dumb insects.These mammoth creatures are much-evolved
descendants of Antarean ants that evolved in symbiosis with a brainless, living
hive.(The hive itself began its
evolutionary history as a simple, non-living physical structure.It slowly incorporated symbiotic organisms – as
Earthly ant hives sometimes do – which eventually merged into a unified whole.)
The Antareans’ giant heads and humps
have, altogether, a few orders of magnitude more neuron-like cells then the
human brain has, and the insects’ interactions are so informationally efficient
that neighboring insects can respond differentially to the behavioral or
chemical effects of other insects’ individual outgoing efferent nerve impulses.The individual ants come in different types
varying in size, structure, sensa, and mobility.There are specialist ants with various
affinities, antagonisms, and predilections, but no ant individually approaches
human intelligence.No individual ant,
for example, has an inkling of Shakespeare despite the Antareans’ great
appreciation of Shakespeare’s work.

There seems to be no reason in principle
that such an entity couldn’t execute any computational function that the human
brain could execute or satisfy any high-level functional description that the
human organism could satisfy.All the
creativity of literary interpretation, all the cleverness of humor and
weirdness of visual art, should be available to the antheads on standard
materialist approaches to cognition.

Maybe there are little spatial gaps
between the ants.Does it matter?Maybe, in the privacy of their homes, the ants
sometimes disperse from the body, exiting and entering through the mouth.Does it matter?Maybe if the exterior body is too severely
injured, the ants recruit a new body from nutrient tanks – and when they march
off to do this, they retain some cognitive coordination, able to remember and
report thoughts they had mid-transfer.They reconvene and say, “Oh it’s such a free and airy feeling to be
without a body!And yet it’s a fearful
thing too.It’s good to feel again the
power of limbs and mouth.May this new
body last long and well!Shall we dance,
then, love?”

We humans are not so different perhaps.In one
perspective (e.g., Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995) we ourselves are but
symbiotic aggregates of simpler organisms that invested in cooperation and
farmed out organismic-level reproductive tasks to a specialized subpopulation.

If you have contiguist prejudices, like
I still do, I hope these examples help undercut them somewhat. The natural thing here, I think, is for the
materialist simply to agree: Conscious entities need not necessarily be
spatially contiguous.

2. Anti-Nesting Principles.

You might object to the Antarean antheads
even if you’re okay with Sirian supersquids.You might think, for example, that the individual ants would be
individually conscious and that, for some reason, it’s impossible for one
conscious organism to be constituted by other conscious organisms.Some theoreticians of consciousness have said
such things – though never (that I’m aware of) with what seems to me a good
motivation.

Hilary Putnam (1965), for example,
stipulates that no organism capable of feeling pain possesses a decomposition
into parts which are separately capable of feeling pain.Putnam offers no argument for this
stipulation apart from the fact that he wants to rule out the apparently absurd
possibility of “swarms of bees as single pain-feelers” (p. 163).He doesn’t explain why this possibility is
absurd for actual swarms of bees, much less why no possible future evolutionary
development of a swarm of conscious bees could ever also be a single
pain-feeler.It seems a danglingly
unjustified exception to Putnam’s otherwise clean functionalism.

Giulio Tononi (forthcoming) also
advances an anti-nesting principle.Tononi
suggests that whenever one informationally integrated system is nested in
another, consciousness occurs only at the level of the most highly integrated
organization.Tononi defends this
principle by appeal to Occam’s razor, with intuitive support from the apparent
absurdity of supposing that a third group consciousness could emerge from two
people talking.[11]But it’s unclear why Tononi should put much
weight on the intuitive resistance to group consciousness, given his near
panpsychism: Tononi defends the idea that a photodiode or an OR-gate could have
a single bit’s worth of consciousness (Tononi 2004, 2008; Balduzzi & Tononi
2009).Why not some such low-level
consciousness from the group, too?And
Occam’s razor is a tricky implement: Although admitting the existence of
unnecessary entities seems like a bad idea, what is an “entity” and what is
“unnecessary” is often unclear, especially in part-whole cases.Is a hydrogen atom an unnecessary entity once
one admits the proton and electron into one’s ontology?What makes it necessary, or not, to admit the
existence of consciousness in the first place?It is obscure why the necessity of admitting consciousness among the
Antarean antheads should turn on whether it is also necessary to admit
conscious experience in some of their subparts.

Anti-nesting principles, though
seemingly designed to avoid counterintuitive implications of group
consciousness, bring different counterintuitive implications in their
train.As Ned Block (1978/1991) argues
against Putnam, such principles appear to have the unintuitive consequence that
if ultra-tiny conscious organisms were somehow to become incorporated into your
brain – perhaps, for reasons unbeknownst to us, each choosing to play the role
of one neuron – you would be rendered nonconscious, despite the fact that all
your behavior, including self-reports of consciousness, might remain the same.(On a strong version of the principle, even
incorporating one such being might end your consciousness; on weaker versions,
perhaps incorporating one such being would be harmless, but having them occupy
your whole visual cortex would make you – evidently unbeknownst to yourself –
phenomenally blind.[12])Tononi’s principle also seems to imply that
if there were a large enough election, with enough different ballot measures,
with the detailed results communicated back to each voter, the resulting polity-level
informational integration would eclipse the informational integration of the
main conscious stream in the human brain, thus causing all the individual
voters to lose consciousness.[13]Perhaps we are already on the verge of this
in California?Furthermore, since
“greater than” is a yes-or-no property rather than a matter of degree, there
ought on Tononi’s view to be an exact point at which higher-level integration
causes our human-level consciousness suddenly to vanish (see esp. his 2010 note
9).There ought to be a point at which
the addition of a single voter would cause the loss of consciousness in all
other voters – even without any detectable behavioral or self-report effects,
or any loss of integration, at the level of individual voters.It seems odd to suppose that so much, and
simultaneously so little, could turn on the discovery of a single mail-in
ballot.

Exclusionary anti-nesting principles seem
to swap one set of counterintuitive implications for another, in the process
abandoning general, broadly appealing materialist principles – the sort of
principles that suggest that we, the Sirian supersquids, and the Antarean antheads
are all be on a par given the broad similarities in our behavior, functional
sophistication, and evolutionary history.

3. Dumbing Down.

If you’re a materialist, you probably
think rabbits are phenomenally conscious – that is, that “there’s something
it’s like to be” a rabbit, that rabbits experience pain, have visual
experiences, and maybe have feelings like fear.They might not have much explicit self-consciousness; they might not
think about their own minds; but they are loci of streams of experience of at
least a here-and-now sensory sort.Some
philosophers would deny rabbit consciousness; more on that later.For the purposes of this section, I’ll assume
you’re on board.And if you accept
rabbit consciousness, you probably ought also to accept the possibility of
consciousness in the Sirian and Antarean equivalents of rabbits.

On Sirius, every species in the squid
evolutionary class has limb-distributed cognitive processing mediated by light
waves through reflective capillaries.Only
the supersquids have language and culture of anything like human complexity;
the remaining branches of the class are occupied by animals of roughly
mammalian intelligence and habits.One
such species is the squidbits, a species similar in intelligence and behavior
to Earthly rabbits.When chased by
predators, Sirian squidbits will sometimes eject all their limbs in a thousand
directions and hide their central heads.The predator might then catch a limb or two, but the squidbit survives
intact.With the exception of some
philosophers and theologians, Sirian supersquids regard squidbits as conscious
entities. Whatever reasoning justifies
the extension of consciousness attribution from human beings to rabbits similarly
justifies the extension of consciousness attribution from supersquids to
squidbits.

A similar story holds on Antares: one species
of antheads possessing human-like intelligence, while other closely-related species
have broadly mammalian intellectual capacities.

Some of the Antarean ant species evolved
the capacity to send individual ants out of their bodies to conduct small
tasks.A few of these species were so
successful in doing so that their bodies lost mobility, and all remote tasks
are now conducted by individual ants or groups of ants.The Antarean antheads regard this as a kind
of evolutionary regression back to pre-mobility hive forms, and there is
dispute about whether their sedentary cousins really have conscious
experience.However, I personally side
with those Antarean philosophers who think that it is simply prejudice to treat
hive mobility as essential to consciousness.Those same Antarean philosophers are inclined to think it is also only
prejudice for Earthlings to deny group-level streams of experience to the most
sophisticated Earthly social insect species.

Gazing into the distant future on
Sirius, I see this: The central body of the squidbit becomes smaller and
smaller – thus easier to hide – and the limbs develop more independent sensory
and homeostatic nutritional capacities, until the primary function of the
central body is reproduction of these increasingly independent limbs.Earthly entomologists come to refer to those
heads as “queens”.Still later, squidbit
queens enter into symbiotic relationships with brainless but mobile hives, and
the thousand bits learn to hide within for safety.These mobile hives look something like woolly
mammoths.

I hope such thought experiments help to loosen
our vertebrate morphological prejudices and maybe, too, help problematize the
distinction between spatially distributed unitary entities and spatially
distributed group entities.Most
materialists ought to be willing to countenance the possibility of
consciousness in spatially distributed systems of considerably less than human
levels of intelligence and self-awareness.

4. A Telescopic View of the United
States.

A planet-sized alien who squints might see
the United States as a single diffuse entity consuming bananas and automobiles,
wiring up communications systems, touching the moon, and regulating its smoggy
exhalations – an entity that is evaluable for the presence or absence of
consciousness.

You might say: The United States is not
a biological organism.It doesn’t have a
life cycle.It doesn’t reproduce.It has no analog of a genetic code that is
copied from generation to generation.It
is not biologically integrated and homeostatic.Therefore, even setting aside concerns about spatial discontiguity, it’s
absurd to think it might have a stream of conscious experience.To this concern, our planet-sized alien –
Martha – has two replies.

First, she asks, why should
consciousness require being an organism in the biological sense?Properly-designed androids, brains in vats,
and gods are things may not be organisms in the biological sense and yet are
sometimes are thought to have consciousness.(We’re assuming materialism here, but some materialists do believe in
actual or possible gods.)Having
distinctive modes of reproduction is often thought to be a central, defining
feature of organisms (e.g., J. Wilson 1999; R.A. Wilson 2005), but it’s unclear
why reproductive mode should matter to consciousness.Human beings might vastly extend their lives
and cease reproduction, or they might conceivably transform themselves through
technology so that any specific condition on having a biological life cycle is
dispensed with, while our brains and behavior remain largely the same.Would we no longer be conscious?Being composed out of cells and organs that
share genetic material might also be characteristic of an organism, but as with
reproduction it is unclear what would justify regarding such composition as
essential to mentality, especially once we consider a variety of physically
possible non-Earthly creatures.

Second, Martha suggests, it’s not clear
that nations aren’t organisms.The
United States is (after all) composed
of cells and organs that share genetic material, to the extent it is composed
of people who are composed of cells and organs and who share genetic
material.The United States also
maintains homeostasis.Farmers grow
crops to feed non-farmers, and these nutritional resources are distributed with
the help of other people via a network of roads.Groups of people organized as import
companies bring food in from the outside environment.Medical specialists help maintain the health
of their compatriots.Soldiers defend
their compatriots against potential threats.Teachers educate future generations so that important roles can continue
to be fulfilled.Home builders, textile
manufacturers, telephone companies, mail carriers, rubbish haulers, bankers,
all contribute to the stable well-being of the organism.Police reduce between-part aggression that is
unhealthy for the entity as a whole.Politicians and bureaucrats work top-down to ensure that certain actions
are coordinated, while other types of coordination emerge spontaneously without
top-down control, just as in ordinary animals.[14]Viewed telescopically, the United States is a
pretty awesome animal.Now some of the
parts of the United States also, individually, are sophisticated and awesome,
but that takes nothing away from the awesomeness of U.S. considered as a single
integrated entity – no more than we should be less awed by human biology if we
were to find that human cells were filled with Planck-scaled mini-societies of
angels whose group-level behavior is partly responsible for our cellular
processes – and no more (to speak more realistically) than we should be
disappointed by human biology as we discover evidence of our dependence on
microscopic symbionts.

Nations also reproduce – not sexually
but by fission.The United States and
several other countries are fission products of Great Britain.In the 1860’s, the United States almost
fissioned again.And fissioning nations
retain traits of the parent that affect the fitness of future fission products
– intergenerationally stable developmental resources, if you will.As in cellular fission, there is a process by
which subparts align into different sides and then separate physically and
functionally.

Martha has just come here from an observational
stint at Ringworld.[15]Ringworld is a vast, habitable surface
spanning an entire planetary orbit.Its
ancestor world, much like Earth, was inhabited by a species of intelligent,
spatially contiguous organisms aligned into nations.After they constructed Ringworld around a
neighboring star, the nations sent colonists.These colonists splintered into separate national groups, no longer
controlled from the home planet.For
cultural reasons, nations growing on Ringworld tend to fission after reaching
populations of a few hundred million; and those that don’t fission are
outcompeted and conquered by right-sized nations.The Ringworld nations compete aggressively to
fill the surface, and immigration between nations is sharply limited.Some nations grow their populations very
quickly, fissioning and fissioning again, then competing against their own and
other nations’ fission products.

Group-level evolutionary pressures on
Ringworld favor fast-growing, fast-fissioning nations whose members are more
given to self-sacrifice than was customary on the home planet or than is
customary on Earth.Eugenic technology also
allows these nations to select a few special individuals in each generation as
the source of genetic material for the next generation, thus funneling
reproduction through a narrow bottleneck.Some of these nations, ultimately the most successful ones, developed
protective envelopes against the aggression of other nations.They learned to move these envelopes around
the Ringworld surface.The envelopes
sprouted appendages.The individuals
within the envelopes grew sedentary relative to the moving envelope, developing
massive pods of neural tissue communicating by high bandwidth radio signal with
other individuals’ neural tissue.Martha
sees no reason to regard these mobile, enveloped, cognitively integrated
nations as less conscious than Sirian supersquids and Antarean antheads.

Martha finds it natural to wonder at
what point in the history of Ringworld group-level consciousness first
arose.Now that she has come to Earth, she
is considering whether some of the nations on Earth may already have crossed that
line, at least for a rabbit-sized dollop of phenomenology.

You might point out to Martha that our
compatriots compete with each other and aggress against each other more than do
the compatriots of the most successful Ringworld nations. Fair enough.But Martha wonders: Is competition and aggression among parts so
detrimental to consciousness, as long as the whole entity is well served?On Earth, at all levels, from the molecular to
the neural to the societal, there’s a vast array of competitive and cooperative
pressures; at all levels, there’s a wide range of actual and possible modes of reproduction,
direct and indirect; and all levels show manifold forms of symbiosis,
parasitism, partial integration, agonism, and antagonism.[16]There isn’t as radical a difference in kind
as people are inclined to think between our favorite level of organization and
higher and lower levels.

Martha’s perspective might not be too
badly wrong.She is not committed to any
anti-nesting principle (see Section 2), and all she is doing is evaluating the United States for the
presence or absence of group-level consciousness.She is inclined to think of individual human
beings as individually conscious cells in a somewhat vague-boundaried,
approximately continent-sized, potentially conscious entity that might not be
fully congealed.Maybe she will decide,
on further evaluation, that this giant organism or thing-on-the-edge-of-being-a-giant-organism
is not yet integrated enough to have nation-level consciousness, or not
intelligent enough, or something.Or
maybe she will decide that the United States does indeed meet the criteria for
consciousness.Either way, the question
makes sense to her – and properly so.It’s not an absurdity.

To be clear: I have not argued, yet,
that the United States is in fact
conscious (if materialism is true).I
have suggested only that the United States is an entity which we can, like
Martha, without absurdity, consider as a candidate
for the possession of phenomenal consciousness.

5. What Is So Special About Brains?

According to materialism, what’s really
special about us is our brains.Brains
are what make us conscious.Maybe brains
have this power on their own, so that even a lone brain in an otherwise empty
universe would have conscious experience if it were structured in the right
way; or maybe our consciousness issues not strictly from the brain itself but
rather from a thoroughly entangled mix of brain, body, and environment (e.g.,
Hurley 1998; Noë 2004; Wilson 2004; Rockwell 2005).But all materialists agree: Brains are
awesome!

Now what is so special about brains, on
the materialist view?Why do they give
rise to conscious experience while a similar mixture of elements in chicken
soup does not?It must be something
about how those elements are organized.Two general features of brain organization stand out: their complex high
order / low entropy information processing, and their role in coordinating
sophisticated responsiveness to environmental stimuli.These two features are of course
related.Brains also arise from an
evolutionary and developmental history, within an environmental context, which
may play a constitutive (and not merely a causal) role in determining function
and cognitive content (Putnam 1975; Burge 1979; Millikan 1984; Davidson 1987;
Dretske 1988, 1995; Wilson 2004).According to a broad class of plausible materialist views, any system
with sophisticated enough information processing and environmental
responsiveness, and perhaps the right kind of historical and environmental
embedding, should have conscious experience.My central claim is: The United States seems to have what it takes, if standard
materialist criteria are straightforwardly applied without post-hoc noodling.It is mainly unjustified morphological
prejudice that blinds us to this.

Consider, first, the sheer quantity of
information transfer among members of the United States.The human brain contains about 1011
neurons exchanging information through an average of about 103
connections per neuron, firing at peak rates of once every several
milliseconds.The United States, in
comparison, contains only about 3 x 108 people.But those people exchange a lot of
information.How much?One might begin by considering how much
information flows from one person to another via stimulation of the retina.The human eye contains about 108
photoreceptor cells.Most people in the
United States spend most of their time in visual environments that are largely
created by the actions of people (including their own past selves).If we count even 1/300 of this visual
neuronal stimulation as involving the relevant sort of person-to-person
information exchange, then the quantity of visual connectedness between people
is similar to the neuronal connectedness within the human brain (1014
connections).Very little of this visual
connectedness is verbal, of course, but neither do neurons literally talk to
each other.Very little of the exchanged
information will make it past attentional filters for substantial further
processing, but analogous considerations apply to information exchange among
neurons.Visual information transfer
between people often works at a delay – the email message composed an hour ago
influences me now, the menu bar designed three years ago still tells me where
to click, the tile pattern chosen for my office floor in 1995 still sometimes
calls my attention.But these delays are
a feature, not a bug; the brain has to work hard to make information effective
persistently and at a delay when it might most be needed.If we insist on real-time exchange, though,
we can probably still get about the right order of magnitude looking only at
retinal stimulations by light that has been reflected directly off other
people’s bodies.And also of course there’s
auditory information exchange between people, which is often more explicitly
communicative, with the details of prosody in particular involving high
informational bandwidth.

Here’s another way to think about the
issue: If at any one time 1/300th of the U.S. population is viewing
internet video at 1 megabit per second, that’s a transfer rate between people
of 1012 bits per second in this one minor activity alone – an
activity detectably informationally impoverished compared to live communication
at normal speaking distance.Cisco
Corporation (2012) estimates total global Internet Protocol traffic in 2011 at
about 2 x 1019 bytes per month, which is about 6 x 1013
bits per second for just this one form of human communication.In the journal Science, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López (2011) make a similar
estimate for total global internet communication in 2007.Recent estimates of the computational
capacity of the human brain are comparable, running from about 1014
to 1017 instructions per second (Moravec 1997; Kurzweil 2005;
Hilbert and López 2011).So internet
connectedness alone puts us in the ballpark.

But even if these estimates are off by a
few orders of magnitude, that doesn’t matter much for my general argument.For one thing, it doesn’t seem likely that
conscious experience requires achieving the degree of informational
connectedness of the entire neuronal structure of the human brain.If mice have conscious experience, as most
people seem to think – if there’s something it’s like to be a mouse – they
manage to achieve it with under 108 neurons.If necessary, too, we could shift example and
reconsider the case with a not-too-remote hypothetical.We could push forward a decade or two,
imagining rather more sensory and digital information transfer among the
populace as communication technology improves.If quantity of information transfer were all that mattered, it seems
that we should accept that the United States either is presently conscious or
could easily become conscious with a few changes.

A more likely source of concern, it
seems to me, is that the information exchange among members of the U.S.
population isn’t of the right type to
engender a genuine stream of phenomenally conscious experience.A simple computer download, even if it
somehow managed to involve 1017 bits per second or more, presumably
wouldn’t by itself alone do the job.For
consciousness, there presumably needs to be some organization of the
information in the service of coordinated, goal-directed responsiveness; and
maybe, too, there needs to be some sort of ability of the system to monitor
itself.

But the United States has these
properties too.Our information exchange
is not in the form of a simply-structured massive internet download.The United States is a goal-directed,
flexibly self-protecting and self-presenting entity.The United States responds, intelligently or
semi-intelligently, to opportunities and threats – not less intelligently, I
think, than a small mammal.The United
States expanded west as its population grew, developing mines and farmland in
traditionally Native American territory.When Al Qaeda struck New York, the United States responded in a variety
of ways, formally and informally, in many branches and levels of government and
in the populace as a whole.Saddam
Hussein shook his sword and the United States invaded Iraq.The U.S. acts in part through its army, and
the army’s movements involve perceptual or quasi-perceptual responses to
inputs: The army moves around the mountain, doesn’t crash into it.Similarly, the spy networks of the CIA detected
the location of Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. then killed.Is there less information, less coordination,
less intelligence than in a hamster?The
Pentagon monitors the actions of the Army, and its own actions.The Census Bureau counts us.The State Department announces the U.S.
position on foreign affairs.The
Congress passes a resolution declaring that we hate tyranny and love apple
pie.This is self-representation.Isn’t it?

I am inviting you to conceptualize the
United States as our planet-sized alien Martha might – to evaluate the capacities
and behaviors of the United States, conceived of as a concrete, spatially
distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts – that is, as an
entity within which citizens and residents play roles somewhat analogous to the
roles that individual cells play in your own body.If you are willing to jettison contiguism and
other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably radical
perspective.

This body does a lot of sophisticated
stuff.It interacts with the environment
and with itself in all kinds of complex, self-regulating informational loops,
including loops that take advantage of all the sophisticated sub-loops that can
occur within individual human brains, and within small and medium-sized and
large groups of individual human beings, and through all of our technological
artifacts.As a house for consciousness,
a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated.

Members of the United States differ in
their opinions and preferred actions, of course.But the opinions and preferences of
individuals are not the opinions and preferences of the United States.The neurons in your visual cortex don’t have
entirely consistent representational contents either, and the neurons in your
motor cortex don’t always vote for the same movement.In both the human brain and the United States
there is a dynamics of compromise that somehow issues in approximately coherent
behavior by the system as a whole.There
might even be cases in which the attitudes and emotions of the United States
differ from the attitudes and emotions of all or most of its members.The United States might be angry about
something, as reflected in group-level punitive behavior and the pronouncements
of individuals acting as spokespeople, even if no individual person in the
United States feels angry about that thing.The United States might endorse a set of attitudes as its official
policy, and consistently act in accord with those attitudes, even if no member
of the United States individually endorses that same set of attitudes.[17]The United States might execute racist
policies even if most of its members aren’t racist, or it might execute
egalitarian policies even if most of its members are racist.

Maybe the actions, attitudes, and
representations of the United States are ultimately reducible to the actions,
attitudes, and representations of U.S. citizens and residents, in some complex
combination.On that issue I take no
stand.(What does “reducible” mean?)All that is necessary for this part of my
argument is that the United States actually engages in actions, adopts
attitudes, and formulates representations, whether reducibly or not, of at
least a mammalian level of sophistication.Perhaps, too, all your actions, attitudes, and representations are in
some sense reducible to other things; few philosophers conclude that this makes
them unreal.

The United States has long been embedded
in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world
beyond, connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its
representations and functional duties to its parts.It’s no randomly congealed “Swampman” that
lacks a content-giving history (Davidson 1987; Dretske 1995; Millikan 2010).The United States interacts cooperatively and
competitively with other beings of its kind.It wars against Germany, then reconciles, then wars again.It threatens Iran.It cooperates with other countries in
threatening Iran.The United States
monitors space for asteroids that threaten Earth and would respond if one were detected,
perhaps cooperatively with other nations.The United States tracks climate change and ozone levels and takes muted
action.

The United States has internal states
that play sophisticated functional roles in guiding its behavior.When the spy camera generates an image of bin
Laden’s compound, that triggers internal states in people who are parts of the
United States.Those internal states
then connect with other internal states which connect in turn with other internal
states, some within people and some between people, generating further
reactions, including possibly calling in the strike team.This functional organization can be
incredibly fancy.The spy camera image will
also generate functional states in computers and photographic plates.We may or may not wish to consider such artifacts
as part of the body of the United States.If they are part of the body, they contribute substantially to the
complexity of its internal functional dynamics; if not, they contribute
substantially to the complexity of the functional dynamics between the United
States and the external world.The
United States imports oil from countries A and B rather than countries C and D,
in response to changes in represented price, and is ready to flip when the represented
price changes.Of course, it is always
individual people, organized in groups, who together import the oil.It is also individual cells in your brain,
organized in groups, and embedded in a larger environment, that together issue
the efferent nerve signals, that together respond to the tilting angle of the
stimulus, that together match the incoming signal with the stored
representation of grandma’s face.Great
things emerge from contextually embedded groups.

One might object that “the United
States” is an abstraction, like “the average Californian” or “the teenage
mind”.The average Californian may be
conscious, and the teenage mind may seethe with angst, but it would be an
absurd category mistake to suppose that therefore there exists some additional
stream of consciousness of the average Californian beyond the streams of
consciousness of each Californian considered individually, or some further bit
of angst in addition to all the individual angst of particular teenagers.This objection, however, forgets the
concreteness on which I have repeatedly insisted.I am willing to be somewhat flexible about
the best way, exactly, to conceptualize the boundaries of the body of the
United States (are the roads included? ex-pat citizens?), but I insist that we
consider the matter concretely, as does Martha our planet-sized alien
observer.It is not like seeing all the
buildings around campus and then seeking some additional ghostly building which
is “the university” (Ryle 1949).Rather,
it’s like seeing all the buildings around campus and then wondering what
features, like open space between the buildings, might be possessed by the
campus as a whole but neglected by someone with too narrow a focus on the
individual parts.

What is it about brains, as hunks of
matter, and brain states, as states of hunks of matter, that makes them special
enough to give rise to consciousness?Looking in broad strokes at the types of things materialists tend to say
in answer – things like sophisticated information processing and flexible,
goal-directed environmental responsiveness, things like representation,
self-representation, multiply-ordered layers of self-monitoring and
informational-seeking self-regulation, rich functional roles, and a content-giving
historical embeddedness – it seems like the United States has all those same
features.In fact, it seems to have them
in a greater degree than do some beings, like rabbits, that we ordinarily regard
as conscious.

What could be missing?

6. What Could Be Missing.

Here I would have liked to apply
particular, detailed materialist metaphysical theories to the question at hand.I face, however, obstacles that seem to me
practically insurmountable.First:
Almost no materialist theoretician explicitly considers the possibility of literal
group consciousness.[18]Thus, it’s a matter of speculation how
properly to apply their theory to a case they may have neglected in their
theory’s design.Second: Many theories,
especially those constructed by neuroscientists and psychologists, implicitly
or explicitly limit themselves to human
or at least vertebrate consciousness, and thus are silent about how
consciousness would work in other sorts of entities (e.g., Baars 1988; Crick
1994).Third: Further limiting the pool
of relevant theories is the fact that few thinkers really engage the
metaphysics from top to bottom.For
example, most theoreticians endorsing “higher order” models of consciousness
don’t provide enough detail on the nature of the “lower order” mental states
for me to evaluate whether the United States would qualify as having such
lower-order states (though if it does, it would probably have the higher-order
states too).[19]Fourth and finally: When I arrived at what I
thought would be a representative sample of four prominent metaphysically
ambitious top-to-bottom theories of consciousness, the task of presenting each
view in enough detail to explore how it would plausibly apply to this new range
of cases proved too complex to embed in an already long essay.[20]Thus, I think further progress on this issue
will require having some concrete counterproposals to evaluate.In this section, I will address three
objections, one inferred from remarks by Chris Eliasmith and Andy Clark on the
extended mind hypothesis and two derived from email correspondence with
prominent materialist theoreticians.In
the next section, I will explore three other ways of escaping my conclusion –
ways that involve rejecting either rabbit consciousness, alien consciousness,
or both.

Chris Eliasmith (2009) and Andy Clark
(2009) have recently argued that consciousness requires high bandwidth neural
synchrony – a type of informational synchrony that is not possible between the
external environment and structures interior to the human brain.Thus, they say, consciousness stays in the
head.Now in the human case, and
generally in the case of Earthly animals, perhaps Eliasmith and Clark are right
– and maybe Earthly animals are all they really have in view.But as a universal principle, insistence on
high bandwidth synchrony seems unmotivated. From a cosmological perspective, it’s hard to
see why speed per se should matter.Couldn’t conscious intelligence be slow-paced, especially in large
entities?And it’s hard to see why
synchrony should matter either, as long as the functional tasks necessary for
intelligent responsiveness are successfully executed.Is there good reason to think, for example,
that consciousness would necessarily be absent in a large slow-paced alien
whose cognition involved transfer delays between its subprocesses?

Fred Dretske, in correspondence, has
suggested that the U.S. could not be conscious because its representational
states depend on the conscious states of others.Such dependence, he says, renders its
representations conventional rather
than natural – and a conscious entity
must have natural representations.[21]

In earlier work, Dretske (1995)
highlights the implausibility of supposing that an object that has no intrinsic
representational functions can become conscious simply because outside users
impose representational functions upon it.We don’t make a mercury column conscious by calling it a thermometer,
nor do we make a machine conscious by calling it a robot and interpreting its outputs
as speech acts.The machine either is or
is not conscious, it seems, independently of our intentions and labels.A wide range of materialists, I suspect, will
and should accept that an entity cannot be conscious if all its representations
depend in this way on external agents.Focusing on such cases, Dretske’s independency criterion seems appealing.

But the citizens and residents of the
United States are parts of the U.S. rather than external agents, and it’s not
clear that the dependency of consciousness on the intentions and purposes of internal agents is problematic in the
same way, if the internal agents’ behavior is properly integrated with the
whole.The internal and external cases
are sufficiently dissimilar that before accepting Dretske’s principle in
general form it seems we should at least consider some potential internal-agent
cases.Maybe Ringworld and Antares can
give us such cases.Although Dretske’s
criterion is not exactly an anti-nesting principle in the sense of Section 2, it
is subject to the same concerns.In its
broad form it seems unmotivated, except by a desire to exclude the types of
case in dispute; it seems improperly to exclude the Antareans, at least on the
assumption that the individual Antarean ants are “others” in the relevant sense;
and it brings new counterintuitive consequences in its train, such as loss of
consciousness upon inhaling Planck-scale people whose actions are smoothly
incorporated into one’s brain functions.On Dretske’s proposed principle, as on the anti-nesting principles
discussed in Section 2, entities that behave identically on a large scale and
have superficially similar developmental histories might either have or lack
consciousness depending on micro-level differences that are seemingly
unreportable (to them), unintrospectible (to them), unrelated to their opinions
about Proust, and thus, it seems natural to suppose, irrelevant.

Dretske conceptualizes his criterion as
dividing “natural” representations from “conventional” or artificial ones.Maybe it is reasonable to insist that a
conscious being have natural representations.But from Martha’s perspective national groups and their representational
activities are eminently natural – as
natural as the structures and activities of groups of cells clustered into
spatially contiguous individual organisms.What should matter from a broadly Dretskean perspective, I’m inclined to
suggest, is that the representational functions emerge naturally from within
rather than being imposed artificially from outside, and that they are properly
ascribed to the entity as a whole rather than only to a subpart.Antarean opinions about Shakespeare meet
these criteria.

Daniel Dennett, in correspondence,
offers a pragmatic objection: To the extent the United States is radically
unlike individual human beings, it’s unhelpful to ascribe consciousness to
it.Its behavior is impoverished
compared to ours and its functional architecture is radically unlike our
own.Ascribing consciousness to the
United States is not so much straightforwardly false, Dennett suggests, as it
is pragmatically misleading, inviting the reader to too closely assimilate
human architecture and group architecture.

To this objection I respond, first, that
the United States is not behaviorally impoverished.It does lots of things, as described in Sections
4 and 5 above – probably more than any individual human does.(In this way it differs from the aggregate of
the U.S., Germany, and South Africa, and probably also from the aggregate of
all of humanity.)Second, to hang the
metaphysics of consciousness on specific details of architecture runs counter
to the spirit that admits the Sirians and Antareans to the realm of beings who
would (hypothetically) be conscious.Thus it risks collapsing into neurochauvinism (Section 7 below).And third, we can presumably dodge such
practical worries about leaping to assimilative inferences by being restrained
in our inferences.We can refrain from
assuming, for example, that when the U.S. is angry its anger is felt,
phenomenologically, as anything like the anger of individual human beings; we
can even insist that “anger” is not a great word and simply the best we can do
with existing language.The U.S. can’t
feel blood rush to its head; it can’t feel tension in its arms; it can’t “see
red”.It can muster its armies, denounce
the offender via spokespeople in Security Council meetings, and enforce an
embargo.What it feels like, if
anything, to enforce an embargo, defenders of U.S. consciousness can wisely
refrain from claiming to know.

Riffling through existing theories of
consciousness, we could try to find, or we could invent, some metaphysically
necessary condition for consciousness that human beings meet that the United
States fails to meet.I don’t doubt that
a clever criterion could be found that would include human beings, exclude the
United States, and include at least some of the more plausible non-human
entities.Perhaps, then, the most
conservative reading of my argument is as a challenge: Let’s try to find a criterion
that delivers this appealing conclusion!But I worry, first, that this is suspiciously post-hoc, and second, that
it lacks the kind of elegant simplicity of a materialism that treats Earthly
rabbits, Sirian squidbits, Antarean antheads, and the United States all as on a
par due to their broad behavioral and functional similarities.

Alternatively, some readers – perhaps especially
empirically-oriented readers – might suggest that my argument does little other
than to display the bankruptcy of metaphysical speculation about bizarre
cases.How could we really know whether
Antarean antheads, assuming them possible, would really be conscious?How could we hope to build any serious theory
on science fictional intuitions?I sympathize
with this reaction.Perhaps we should abandon
any aspiration for a truly universal metaphysics that would cover the whole
range of bizarre possibilities. But that
reaction wouldn’t give us much guidance about the question of U.S.
consciousness, if we are suspicious enough of common sense to think that our
commonsensical reaction does not decisively settle the question.Despite my sympathies with skepticism about
the metaphysics of bizarre cases, I want, and I think it’s reasonable to want,
at least a conditional assessment or best guess about whether we are parts of a
larger conscious organism, and I see no better
way to try to reach such a tentative assessment.

7. Three Ways Out.

Let’s briefly consider more conservative
views about the distribution of consciousness in the universe, to see if they
can provide a suitable exit from the bizarre conclusion that the United States
is literally conscious.

Eliminativism.Maybe the United States isn’t conscious
because nobody is conscious – not
you, not me, not rabbits, not aliens.Maybe “consciousness” is such a corrupt, broken concept, embedded in
such a radically false worldview, that we should discard it entirely, as we
discarded the concepts of demonic possession, the luminiferous ether, and the
fates.

In this essay, I have tried to use the
concept of consciousness in a plain way, unadorned with dubious commitments
like irreducibility, immateriality, and infallible self-knowledge.Maybe I have not succeeded, but then I hope
you will permit me to rephrase my claim: Whatever it is about us in virtue of
which we are tempted to say human beings and rabbits have conscious experience
or phenomenology, the United States has that same thing.

The most visible philosophical
eliminativists about terms from folk psychology still seem to have room in
their theories for consciousness, suitably stripped of dubious commitments.[22]So if you tread this path, you’re going farther
than they.In fact, Paul Churchland (1984/1988)
says several things that seem, jointly, to commit him to accepting the idea
that cities or countries would be conscious (though he doesn’t to my knowledge
explicitly draw the conclusion).[23]

Galen Strawson says that denying the
existence of conscious experience is “the strangest thing that has ever
happened in the whole history of human thought” (2006, p. 5).Maybe it’s not quite that strange; but it seems at least as strange as believing that
the United States is conscious.

Extreme
sparseness.Here’s another way out for the materialist: Argue that consciousness is
extremely rare, so that really only very specific types of systems possess it,
and then argue that the United States does not meet the very restrictive
criteria.If the criteria are
specifically neural criteria, this
position is a form of neurochauvinism, which I will discuss shortly.Setting aside neurochauvinism, the most
commonly endorsed version of the extreme sparseness view is one in which language is required for consciousness.[24]Thus, dogs, wild apes, and human infants
aren’t conscious; maybe neither are certain deaf-mute or extremely aphasic
adults.On this view, there is nothing
it’s like to be such beings, any more than there is something it’s like (most
people think) to be a diode or a fleck of dust.To a dog, all is dark inside, or rather, not even dark.This view is both radically counterintuitive
and, I’d suggest, a gross overestimation of the gulf between us and our nearest
relatives.

However, it’s not clear that we get to
exclude the consciousness of the United States by restricting consciousness to
beings with language, since the United States does seemingly speak as a
collective entity, as I’ve mentioned.Its linguistic behavior, interpreted as such by other nations, influences
the behavior, both linguistic and non-linguistic, of those other nations.If the materialist is to deny U.S.
consciousness on the grounds of general commitment to the extreme sparseness of
consciousness in the world, then even more severe restrictions are required.Perhaps phenomenal consciousness requires the
ability to self-report the existence of phenomenal consciousness?Then four-year-olds might not even have it.This seems a tough road.[25]

Neurochauvinism.A third way out is to assume that consciousness
requires neurons – neurons clumped
together in the right way, communicating by ion channels and all that, rather
than by voice and gesture.All the
entities that we have actually met and that we normally think of as conscious
do have their neurons bundled in that way, and the 3 x 1019 neurons
of the United States are not as a whole bundled in that way.So maybe by identifying consciousness with
certain types of neural states, we can legitimately rule out U.S.
consciousness.

This view gains intuitive support
through examples from Ned Block (1978/1991) and John Searle (1980, 1984).Suppose we arranged the people of China into
a giant communicative network resembling the functional network instantiated by
the human brain.It would be absurd,
Block says, to regard such an entity as conscious (though see Lycan 1981).Similarly, Searle asserts that no arrangement
of beer cans, wires, and windmills, no matter how cleverly set up, could ever
house a genuine stream of conscious experience (though see Cuda 1985).According to Block and Searle, what these
entities are lacking isn’t a matter of large-scale functional structure of the
sort that reveals itself in patterns of input-output relations.Consciousness requires not that, or not only that;
consciousness requires human biology.

Or rather, consciousness, on this view,
requires something like human
biology.In what way like?Here Block and Searle aren’t very
helpful.According to Searle, for
example, “any system capable of causing consciousness must be capable of
duplicating the causal powers of the brain” (1992, p. 92).In principle, Searle suggests, this could be
done by completely different physical mechanisms.But what mechanisms could do this and what
mechanisms could not, Searle makes no attempt to adjudicate, other than by
excluding certain systems, like beer-can systems, as plainly the wrong sort of
thing.Instead, Searle gestures
hopefully at future science.

The reason for not strictly insisting on
neurons, I suspect, is this: If we’re playing the intuition game, that is, if
counterintuitiveness is our reason for excluding beer-can systems and organized
groups of people, then we’re going to have to allow the possibility, at least
in principle, of conscious beings from other planets who operate other than by
neural systems like our own.That’s
because our armchair intuitions tell us that some such beings could be
conscious despite lacking neurons.

From a cosmological perspective it would
be strange to suppose that of all the possible beings in the universe that are
capable of sophisticated, self-preserving, goal-directed environmental
responsiveness, beings that could presumably be (and in a vast enough universe
presumably actually are) constructed in myriad strange and diverse ways,
somehow only we with our neurons have genuine conscious experience, and all
others are mere automata there is nothing it is like anything to be.Contrary to the “Copernican Principle” of
cosmological method,[26]
this view would suggest that we, as the sole possessors of consciousness, are
in a uniquely favored position in the universe.How lucky we are!(The other
beings, I suppose, only say they’re
lucky, or only emit noises that we would mistakenly regard as having that semantic
content.[27])For this reason, it seems not only
unintuitive but also scientifically unjustified to suppose that conscious
experience requires Earthly biology.It
would be like supposing that life requires Earthly nucleotides.

If they’re to avoid un-Copernican
neuro-fetishism, the question must become, for Block and Searle, what feature of neurons, possibly
possessed also by non-neural systems, gives rise to consciousness?In other words, we are back with the question
of Section 5 – that is, with the question of what is so special about brains –
and the only well-developed answers on the near horizon seem to involve appeals
to the sorts of features that the United States has, features like massively
complex informational integration, self-monitoring, and a long-standing history
of sophisticated environmental responsiveness.

This view, then, faces a dilemma.Either appeal to the types of features that
seem the most plausible material features of conscious neural systems, thereby
letting in the Sirians and the Antareans and probably also the United States,
or fall into an extreme neurochauvinism that, by excluding aliens, jettisons
both the Copernican Principle and the types of intuition preservation that seem
to be at the foundation of the neurochauvinist’s own argument.If there is a path between these two horns,
it remains almost entirely uncharted.

8. Conclusion.

In sum, the argument is this: There
seems to be no principled reason to deny entityhood, or entityhood-enough, to
spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings.So the United States is at least a candidate for the literal possession of
real psychological states, including consciousness.Once we view the United States in this way,
the question then becomes whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for
consciousness.My suggestion is that if
those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and alien
species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States
probably does meet those criteria.The
United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in
sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings.Its internal representational states are
functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned
artificially from outside by the acts of an external user.And the United States exhibits complex
linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that
reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external
conditions.In light of such
considerations, I find myself drawn to think that the materialist probably
ought to accept, at least tentatively, that the United States is conscious.

But that conclusion seems so absurdly
bizarre!If we think that our sense of
bizarreness if a good index of reality in fundamental matters about the
physical and metaphysical structure of the universe, that would be good reason
to reject the conclusion.But even a
passing glance at contemporary physics and metaphysics suggests that common
sense is no sure guide (a point I develop farther in Schwitzgebel in draft).Large things are hard to see properly when
you’re in their midst.The homunculi in
your head, the tourist in Leibniz’s mill, they don’t see consciousness either.[28]Too vivid an appreciation of the local
mechanisms overwhelms their view.

If the United States is conscious, is
Exxon-Mobil?Is an aircraft carrier?[29]Is the seven dwarfs of Snow White?Where does it
end?And if such entities are conscious,
do they have rights? Is dissolution
murder?The United States doesn’t seem
to think of itself as a conscious being, but might that change if enough people
adopt the perspective of this essay?I’m
not sure whether I have provided grounds for believing the U.S. is conscious, or
instead a challenge to materialist theories of consciousness, or instead
reasons to be wary in general of ambitions toward a universal metaphysics of
mind. Whoops, I hear someone knocking on
my office door....[30]

Beisbart,
Claus, and Tobias Jung (2006).Privileged, typical, or not even that?Our place in the world according to the Copernican and Cosmological
Principles.Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 37, 225-256.

Bettencourt,
B. Ann, Marilynn B. Brewer, Marian Rogers Croak, and Normal Miller (1992).Cooperation and the reduction of intergroup
bias: The role of reward structure and social orientation.Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 301-319.

[1] For
purposes of this essay, I’m going to assume that we know, at least roughly,
what “material stuff” is.I recognize that
this assumption might be problematic.Discussions
include Montero 1999; Chomsky 2009; Stoljar 2010.

[2] The
empirical literature on folk opinion about group consciousness is more equivocal
than I would have thought, however.See Knobe
and Prinz 2008; Sytsma and Machery 2009; Arico 2010; Huebner, Bruno, and
Sarkissian 2010.

Few scholars have clearly endorsed the
possibility of literal group consciousness. On group minds without literal consciousness
see McDougall 1920; Wilson 2004; and the recent literature on collective
intentionality (e.g., Gilbert 1989; Clark 1994; Bratman 1999; Tuomela 2007;
Searle 2010; List and Pettit 2011; Huebner forthcoming).For more radical views of group minds see
Espinas 1877/1924; Schäffle 1875/1896; maybe Wundt 1897/1897; maybe Strawson
1959 (none of whom were materialists).Perhaps the best developed group consciousness view – with some
affinities to the present view, though again not materialist – is that of
Tielhard de Chardin 1955/1965.See also
Lewis & Viharo’s “Google Consciousness”, TEDxCardiff (June 9, 2011); Vernor
Vinge’s science fiction portrayal of group minds in Vinge 1992, 2011; and
Averroës (Ibn Rushd) on the active intellect, 12th c./2009.

[3] See
Gopnik and Schwitzgebel 1998 and especially Schwitzgebel in draft.Some other recent philosophers with doubts
about the merits of common sense metaphysics are Churchland 1981; Stich 1983;
Kornblith 1998; Dennett 2005; Ladyman and Ross 2007; Mandik and Weisberg 2008;
and Weinberg, Gonnerman, Buckner, and Alexander 2010.Hume 1740/1978 and Kant 1781/1787/1998 are
also interesting on this issue, of course.

[9] Sound
waves might also work as well or better, as in Vinge 1992, 2011.

[10] See,
for example, Greene 2011.

[11] In an
earlier work, Tononi (2010, note 9) discusses an anti-nesting principle without
endorsing it.There he states that such
a principle is “in line with the intuitions that each of us has a single,
sharply demarcated consciousness”.In his
more recent article, Tononi does not repeat his appeal to that intuition –
perhaps thinking that the principle gets stronger support from the Occam’s
razor argument and intuition against group consciousness.

[12] For a
related point involving replacement by homunculi or mechanical parts, see Cuda
1985; Chalmers 1996.

[13] In
conversation, Tononi has resisted this suggestion, saying that the amount of
informational integration in such an election would not be nearly as high as it
seems to me it would be.It remains unclear
to me what might justify Tononi’s resistance on this point, especially given his
principle that spatial and temporal grain are not intrinsically meaningful but
rather should be chosen to maximize the measure of integrated information. (I choose a temporal grain of one day and a
spatial grain of one node per voter.)

[14] See
Stock 1993 for a similar perspective presented in lively detail.

[15] An
example inspired by Larry Niven (1970), but developed a different direction.

[18] Two
notable exceptions are Robert A. Wilson (2004) and Bryce Huebner
(forthcoming).Huebner seems open to the
possibility of group consciousness while refraining from fully endorsing
it.Wilson I am inclined to read as
rejecting group-level consciousness on the assumption that it has been only
sparsely and confusedly advocated, with no advocate meeting a reasonable burden
of proof.

[19] For a
review of higher-order theories, see Carruthers 2001/2011.

[20] The
theories I chose were Dretske’s, Dennett’s, Humphrey’s, and Tononi’s.You can see some of my preliminary efforts in
blog posts Schwitzgebel 2012a-e.On the
most natural interpretations of these four test-case views, I thought that
readers sympathetic with any of these authors’ general perspectives ought to
accept that the United States is conscious.And I confess that I still do think that, despite protests from Dretske,
Dennett, Humphrey, and Tononi themselves in personal communication.(See the comments section of Schwitzgebel
2012c for Humphrey, below for Dretske and Dennett, and Section 2 for Tononi.)

[21] In
earlier published work, Dretske says that a representation is natural if it is
not “derived from the intentions and purposes of its designers, builders, and
users” (1995, p. 7) rather than the more general criterion, above, of independency
from “others”.In light of our
correspondence on group consciousness, he has (at least tentatively) modified
his view.

[23] Churchland
characterizes as a living being “any semiclosed system that exploits the order
it already possesses, and the energy flux through it, in such a way as to
maintain and/or increase its internal order” (1984/1988, p. 173).By this definition, Churchland suggests,
beehives, cities, and the entire biosphere all qualify as living beings
(ibid.).Consciousness and intelligence,
Churchland further suggests, are simply sophistications of this basic pattern –
cases in which the semiclosed system exploits energy to increase the
information it contains, including information about its own internal states
and processes (1984/1988, p. 173 and 178).

[24] This
view is famously espoused by Descartes (1649/1991).Carruthers (1996, 1998) has recently defended
the view from a materialist perspective.See also Dennett’s qualms in his 1996 and 1998.

[28] On
the homunculi, see for example Fodor 1968.Leibniz imagines entering into a vastly enlarged brain as into a mill in
his 1714/1989.

[29] See
Hutchins 1995 for a vivid portrayal of distributed cognition in military vessels.

[30] For helpful
discussion of these issues in the course of writing, thanks to Santiago Arango,
Mark Biswas, Ned Block, Dan Dennett, Fred Dretske, Louie Favela, Kirk Gable,
Chris Hill, Nick Humphrey, Bill Lycan, Pete Mandik, Tori McGeer, Giulio Tononi,
Vernor Vinge, and Rob Wilson; to audiences at University of Cincinnati,
Princeton University, and Bob Richardson’s seminar on extended cognition; and
to the many readers who posted comments on relevant posts on my blog, The
Splintered Mind.My wife Pauline worries
that I am too passionate in defending the rights of antheads who, she says,
don’t even really exist.My
twelve-year-old son Davy, however, thinks that for the first time in my career
I’m now actually thinking about something interesting.